Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

What I really like about nuclear power is that, when you turn it on, it works and it's dispatchable. Compare that to wind power, which, in the last quarter, produced the same amount of energy as it did three years ago, despite the fact that an extra 2,400 gigawatts of capacity has been installed in the system. That extra 2,400 gigawatts of capacity cost billions of dollars to install. And what did we get for that money? Nothing, nada, zip—and that is the problem with unreliables. You don't know if they're going to turn up for work that day. You cannot run a country hoping and praying that the wind's going to blow or the sun's going to shine.

When that side of the chamber accuses this side of being Luddites and of not believing in technology, nothing could be further from the truth. I do believe in technology, but I happen to know that if you want to unlock the energy of a molecule, you've got to go high up into the atomic numbers. That's where the real energy is. If you look at the probes that NASA sends out to Mars, they have plutonium batteries that last for years and can send a vehicle into outer space. Imagine the day when we can tap into nuclear power in such a way that we have batteries in our cars or semitrailers that don't have to recharge for years. We may be a long way away from that today, but that is the technology of tomorrow, and that is why we desperately need nuclear technology in this country, because we cannot continue to rely on unreliables. We cannot continue to sink billions of dollars into an energy grid and get nothing for it.

Should I mention the words Snowy Hydro? Should I mention the words green hydrogen? You criticise us about a pipedream of building nuclear power plants when there are over 400 already installed around the world and another 60 being built and 110 slated to be built by over 30 countries, including the biggest countries in the world like the USA, France and China. No, no, no—you criticise us for that, but you've got your own pipedreams with some of this green hydrogen stuff that has never worked. The idea that you can somehow export this energy overseas is just a pipedream.

The other thing we need to talk about is waste. When I questioned the CSIRO about their costs in terms of building renewables—and I did just that yesterday morning—they couldn't tell me what the capacity factor of a windfarm was. Of course, the capacity factor that they use in their assumptions is 50 per cent. The real capacity factor over the last five years has been 30 per cent. The highest capacity factor of any energy source, as stated by the energy commission in the USA, is actually in nuclear energy, and that's on par with coal. But the CSIRO assume the capacities of those energy sources are only 60 per cent. Why? Because they always give first dibs to the unreliables, solar in particular, in the middle of the day.

When people say renewables are cheaper, it may be correct that in the middle of the day it is cheaper to sell solar, because you have to unload 32 terawatts of solar in order to meet the Renewable Energy Target that was set up years ago. So energy companies sell this stuff at a loss throughout the middle of the day, and then the zealots will take that and say, 'Look how cheap it is,' but those losses made through the middle of the day are then recouped by coal at night-time, when coal power stations are running. So what you're actually doing is increasing the costs of energy all around to basically subsidise renewables in the middle of the day.

The other beautiful thing about nuclear power is you won't have hundreds of kilometres of transmission lines and you won't have all that toxic sludge from lithium batteries and all the niobium, copper, nickel and everything like that that goes into them—not that there are enough rare metals in the earth to actually build this stuff. Let's get back to reality. Let's look forward for the future and embrace nuclear. (Time expired)